


The Second

by pega



Series: Genius [2]
Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 17:31:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15272640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pega/pseuds/pega
Summary: Maeby doesn’t need to hide. No one’s looking for her. But she nods anyway, because this is nice, being seen like this by a woman with equally sharp eyes.





	The Second

When Maeby is four, she teaches herself Spanish by watching El Amor Prohibido with subtitles on. She knows that it comes on at eleven am, after her cartoons but before she’s supposed to take a nap, and she masters a quick channel switch to avoid unnecessary questions. There’s a lot of kissing and yelling, which is just scandalous enough to make it fun to sneak around and watch. 

 

She thinks the language sounds beautiful too, full of low round sounds she can’t get in Boston. She dreams of learning every language in the world, seeing every country and having adventures like Maria.

 

No one asks about her television habits though, no one was ever looking, even when she starts speaking Spanish to her kindergarten teacher. Her mom and dad don’t go to parent-teacher conferences anyway, so the teacher’s assumption that they speak Spanish at home goes unchecked for the entire year. Maeby switches schools soon after that, once her mother gets wind of the ‘alternative education’ trend that's sweeping the upper echelon of Boston society.

 

The new school is fine, more or less.

 

The other kids are more gullible than public school kids for sure. Maeby realizes this when she sarcastically tells Sunshine Stockford that her mother works for the CIA and the entire class starts clamoring for stories. 

 

So Maeby does, charging a quarter or dessert for requests, even though at the new school no one has any real sugar in their lunches. It’s the principle of the thing. Nothing comes free in life.

 

There aren’t any grades, but her math teacher sometimes gives her extra worksheets with trickier problems. Maeby doesn’t like doing more work than she has to, so she pointedly ignores them as long as she can.

 

Sometimes though, the problems are really interesting.

 

Maeby loves variables, for starters. The idea of using a mystery as a tool to solve a bigger problem is appealing, and it’s fun to try and chip away at these questions that seem so big until the answer is glaringly obvious. She starts to daydream about what she can do with that sort of superpower, the power to change big problems into small problems with a wave of her pencil. She doesn’t have any big problems yet. Her mom is too busy and beautiful to spend time with her, and her dad has a Really Important Job. She’s alone most of the time and it’s awesome. She doesn’t even have to switch the channel back to English anymore. 

 

When Maeby is eight, her family goes to Gangie’s for Thanksgiving. She’s only met the other members of her family in passing before this, only caught glimpses from phone calls and photographs. She knows she has a cousin, knows she has three uncles of varying reliability. The promised cousin and one of the uncles don’t appear though, in the end, they’re spending time with the other half of their family, and Maeby is left alone as the only kid at this dinner of crystal and too many forks. 

 

Her grandmother is smaller than she expected. Gangie is meticulously well dressed, hair tightly styled and neck adorned with the largest diamond necklace Maeby has ever seen. She looks like the queen of a very wealthy kingdom, and Maeby decides then that she loves her.

 

There are people whispering in Spanish serving the food, so Maeby starts chatting happily with the nearest woman. They’re about halfway through some small talk about favorite characters on El Amor Prohibido when her grandmother pulls her away with sharp nails. 

 

And at first, Maeby doesn’t understand.

 

“Am I in trouble?” She asks, blinking up at this woman she barely knows. If it was her mom, she’d know exactly how to distract her. (Hey mom, that guy is checking you out! Hey mom, is that a sale sign? Hey mom-)

 

But she doesn’t know this woman she’s supposed to call Gangie. 

 

Gangie tilts her head. “Where did you learn Spanish?”

 

Oh. “TV, I guess?” Maeby shrugs. 

 

Her grandmother pulls her lips together tight. “Come with me.” She keeps her grip on Maeby’s arm a little too tight, walks a little too fast, but this is the most exciting thing to happen yet on this visit. 

 

She pushes Maeby into a bedroom that smells way too strongly of vanilla candles. Gangie gets on her hands and knees, which looks wrong for a lady that elegant and pulls out a jar of coins. They’re old and kind of dingy, and the jar looks thoroughly out of place for the rest of the apartment. Gangie reaches in blindly and pulls out a handful, presents them to Maeby. “How much?”

 

It’s a little insulting, honestly. “$3.46?” 

 

Gangie doesn’t react, just nods and pulls out another handful. “Added to this?”

 

“$4.88.” 

 

Her grandmother grins, full of challenge. “Skim fifteen percent off the top.”

 

“Did I say $4.88?” Maeby smiles back. “I must have miscounted. It’s $4.14.” 

 

Gangie hands Maeby seventy-three cents, which is a pretty negligible amount of money, but she’s old, so Maeby figures her sense of how much things cost must be out of whack. 

 

Maeby learns a lot that afternoon over a half dozen chess games with her grandmother. She learns chess, first of all, learns that the queen is the most important piece on the board. She learns about using her cuteness to her advantage, grinning at her parents when they stop to coo over her and Gangie playing “so nicely” together. She learns about pawns, learns about sacrifice, learns that she should really stop filling out those fun math problems in school and should start keeping those big ideas private, secret.

 

“The library will be your friend, dear.” Gangie destroyed her at chess for the first few rounds, but Maeby is getting better at blocking her now. “Buying books would be a waste of space and money, the way you’d go through them. Plus, it’s more discrete.” Gangie talks a lot about being discrete, which Maeby only sort of kind of gets. But when she’s playing a trick on her friends or trying to get something out of her parents, she sometimes has to lie like that, pretend to be dumber than she is or nicer than she is, so maybe it’s like that. Only apparently, Gangie thinks Maeby should be doing this all the time, hiding. 

 

Maeby doesn’t need to hide. No one’s looking for her. But she nods anyway, because this is nice, being seen like this by a woman with equally sharp eyes. 

 

At the end of the visit, Gangie sniffs and announces in a large voice that Maeby should really be learning French, the lady’s language. Her mother bristles and her father starts waxing poetic, but Maeby winks back at her grandmother. 

 

There’s got to be some French movies on tv she can watch. 


End file.
